What makes some romance novels better than others?
By GEETIKA MAHAJAN — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
Like any other teenage girl, I spent my high school years completely enamoured with the romantic comedy (rom-com) genre. This obsession coincided with the rise of “BookTok,” a subgenre of TikTok users who use the app as a forum for book reviews and recommendations. Every other person on my For You page was telling me to stop scrolling because they knew about a book that I just “had to” read.
The books that BookTok is enamoured with are hit-or-miss — especially in the rom-com genre. For every “Beach Read,” there’s a “The Spanish Love Deception”— which is to say, for every book that makes the reader want to cry and make a wedding-themed Pinterest board, there’s another one that’s objectively awful. This is particularly interesting because romance as a genre is known for being cliché; the predictable cocktail of emotions promised to the reader leaves little room for surprises. There must exist some ontological property that makes certain romances more enjoyable to readers, even if they’re all cut from the same cloth.
There are a few characteristics that make any book good. Writing blogs will cite the importance of world building, pacing and an engaging plot — but all of these, I believe, are symptomatic of good writing anyways. I think that the greatest common denominator amongst the best romance novels is that they’re all rooted in emotional realism, even if the plots themselves feel fantastical.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that rom-coms are beloved because they allow readers to picture themselves in the characters’ shoes. I’m not a blonde literary agent, but I loved Emily Henry’s “Book Lovers” to pieces. I don’t have a Ph.D. in analytical magic, but “Katabasis” was the first book I’ve read in a while that I genuinely couldn’t put down. When I read these books, I rooted for the protagonists and love interests because I felt like I was on the same emotional journey as they were.
The most important factor in writing a successful romance novel is the author’s ability to conceptualize and convey human emotion. Though it’s a well-known fact that people make ill-advised decisions when they’re emotional, it’s hard to root for a fictional character when you can’t fully understand the emotional context they’re acting within. For this reason, romance authors have to do a lot of emotional heavylifting to make the characters relatable to the reader. Without establishing this kind of relatability, characters may seem irrational or weak-willed: as exemplified by the backlash that Colleen Hoover’s “Ugly Love” received because the protagonist kept running back to a man whose only personality traits were being aloof and attractive.
On the flipside though, when emotional realism is done well, it can be one of the most satisfying kinds of stories to read. Romance novels are built around the characters’ inner worlds — their fears, motivations and wounds — and allowing the reader to understand and become invested in a couple without being didactic or overstating what should be implied requires authors to master a difficult combination of subtlety and empathy.
Many people stereotype the romance genre as “superficial;” something that only teenage girls and lonely women read. It’s easy to point to the outrageously bad books and say, “See, you guys will read anything!” However, it’s not that this range of quality reflects the genre itself; rather, it proves how difficult it is to write a good rom-com.
BookTok has dissected the world of rom-com literature into simple, recipe-like components, labeling books based on the tropes they include (such as “enemies-to-lovers” or “second-chance-romance”) and, in the process, watering down the importance and meaning behind this genre. At their cores, these stories remind us about the value of our emotions, the importance of staying in touch with them and just how powerful they can really be.
Written by: Geetika Mahajan — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
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